The Gaming Month Ahead – February 2015

February this year sees one of PS4’s big name exclusives coming out. The Order: 1886 comes to an audience that doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Fuelled by a media that seems to want to crucify it at every opportunity, it would be quite a turn up if The Order actually turned out to be a something entirely unexpected. There isn’t much chance of that sadly, it is what it is – a third person cover based shooter with heavy story emphasis and QTE’s. But then that sentence can almost described Gears of War 3 and Quantum Theory – and both of those are light years apart in execution. Let’s hope The Order is more like Gears!

Nintendo releases their New Nintendo 3DS this month as well. It comes with it’s own second analogue stick, which should help when playing games like Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate – also out this month of 3DS.

Speaking of handhelds, both the 3DS and Vita have a lot coming out this month. Besides Monster Hunter 4, 3DS also has Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D and an Ace Combat releasing. Vita continues to get lots of Japanese style games and gets Hyperdimension Neptunia Re:Birth 2, Hyperdevotion Noire and Criminal Girls.

Evolve comes out near the starting of the month. There’s a lot of media push around Evolve, though reactions to the beta’s have been somewhat mixed. Their pre-order shambles also haven’t helped much, locking away key content behind pre-orders with specific retailers really does just reach the height of cynical.

Dead or Alive 5 Last Round comes to PlayStation and Xbox. Coming with all the new characters and stages as well as a slew of costume content from the previous incarnations of the title. It comes to PS4 and Xbone looking as slick as you’d expect as well, 1080p and 60fps. The Steam version was supposed to bring the franchise to the PC for the first time, but has been pushed back until late march. It’s a shame, but a delay is always better than a broken product.

There really does seem like a lot to mention this month. Resident Evil Revelations 2 releases on consoles and PC (not the WiiU, silly) It continues the original Revelations move to slower, more isolated gameplay, rather than the action direction the main series has been moving in. The game is set to release in episodic content – though considering those episodes all come out over the spread of a month, I’m not quite sure what the purpose of that move was. Raid mode also makes a return, though it will initially be offline only for the moment. Still, with the inclusion of split screen (even on PC!) it should be great for local co-op.